More than two weeks after it ran aground on the beach in Ocracoke, North Carolina, Scott Pumphrey’s 55-foot motoryacht is inching closer to getting back in the water again.
The yacht, a 2001 Novatek named Vivens Aqua, is being pulled along the beach by an excavator while it sits on four giant pneumatic pins that roll it forward, slowly, very slowly. The 55,000-pound boat rolls on three pins at a time while the rear one is removed, deflated, moved to the front and inflated again. This takes a while.
But the boat only has another 500 feet or so before it can be floated again in the deeper water of Ocracoke Inlet, and then towed to Morehead City for repairs.
Pumphrey, a retired Baltimore police lieutenant, bought the boat in Palm Coast, Florida, and was bringing it up the coast to the Chesapeake. He and his wife, Karen, live in Salisbury, Maryland.
He moved on the boat on Jan. 5 and cruised up the Intracoastal Waterway to Wilmington, North Carolina, where Karen joined him. They kept on the Waterway to Morehead City, where Pumphrey decided to go outside to the ocean to make faster time.
The weather was good, and he was aiming for Silver Lake, the marina at Ocracoke Inlet. But about half a mile from the inlet, he said, the boat’s steering failed, the weather changed, and he was not able to control the boat. It washed up on Ocracoke’s South Point on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore at 1 a.m. on January 25.
In a plan worked out with the National Park Service and the Coast Guard, workers drained 700 gallons of diesel fuel from the boat, and then TowBoatUS from Morehead City tried to pull the boat off the beach. That didn’t work. Plan B called for an excavator company to pull the boat up the beach and then south toward the inlet.
Pumphrey has been staying on the unheated boat all this time, heating up food on a propane camp stove. He’s recharging his phone with solar power. And he’s hoping to get boat back in the water again, very soon. Read more https://ocracokeobserver.com/2022/02/08/yacht-creeps-toward-deeper-water-and-refloating/ and see the video below:
